“White Lies takes its name from a late 1990s painting (White Lie, 1997), not in any literal sense of an untruth or half-truth, but instead as a way to speak of the pursuit an end and of a truth. Thompson’s truth is the materials she uses and her pursuit of an end is the processes she works with. Processes that appear to distance the hand and to automate painting, through use of rollers and mechanical print processes. But this is part of an agitation and unlocking of modernist agenda, of a paradoxical politic that on the one hand proposes contextual anonymity in production and on the other draws situation into that production. Within a heightened automation and formal language of painting Thompson’s works are resistant and resilient, remaining firmly of and by the hand. It is everywhere in the works, visible, palpable and resonant. 

Thompson works towards ends that are rarely finite, working and re-working pieces across months and often across years. Pieces are worked onto or worked away, and paint as a material, as a colour, as a veil, and as an image assumes through this new edges, new forms, new mediations, new divisions and new imaginings. Thompson’s works are visual architectures, at once functions of space and mechanical order and at once of a humanity and touch that is light and transient, alive to time, alert to that which is raw and visceral, and unflinching to fleeting moments of encounter. Thompson’s paintings fail to stand still or to stand quietly. They are instead lasting and durational statements towards an end, not of painting in and of itself, but more profoundly of its intersections.”

Charles Danby